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Comment by a008t | Hacker News Reader

A couple days ago we were discussing on here how AI winter is coming and will likely arrive because of failure of driverless cars: https://blog.piekniewski.info/2018/05/28/ai-winter-is-well-o...

Are Waymo somehow much better at handling corner cases, identifying obstacles and their trajectories correctly and not having to disable emergency breaking to stop the car from randomly breaking at speed? Or are they just more careful/skilled with their marketing and publicity? Are they only planning to deploy the vehicles in specific, fairly controlled conditions, rather than claim general self-driving capabilities?

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(1) Yes. (2) Yes. (3) Yes.

The main point is that Waymo had a 4-6 year head start over virtually everyone else in this industry. So it's not surprising that their technology seems significantly better! Obviously we don't yet know how much better, or if it's good enough to improve on the average human driver. But they seem to be pretty close.

The downside to their head start is that they had to build their system from scratch, and there was a great deal of trial and error.

The upside is that they had the very best, most passionate and talented roboticists in the field working on it, as nobody else was hiring at the time. For every company entering late in the game, securing top tier talent is the biggest hurdle.

Not only the head start but they weren't a business, they did deep research for the sake of it. Not to sell it right away. Many said that mobileye and others were very crude systems. I think the idea was that having real mileage in Teslas and similar experience would accelerate improvement .. so far it didn't help AFAIK<

Given they have the weight of Google behind them it wouldn’t surprise me if they are better at figuring this stuff out.

But they’ve certainly been much more cautious and mature. I imagine they recorded street view driving for years and used that as additional training data. It seems pretty clear they’re not pushing the envelope of their own abilities nearly as far as Uber, sticking to what they’re confident they can do as they keep trying to learn more.

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